Hurricane Sandy was not due to global warming, and the Climate Commission is wrong to claim otherwise.

BY CIRCULATING commentary that suggests hurricane Sandy was exacerbated by human-caused global warming, the Climate Commission is wilfully misleading the public. Let us be clear, Sandy was barely a category 1 hurricane as it crossed the densely populated north-east United States.

The enormous damage resulted not from wind, but from flooding and inundation over low-lying areas where housing and commercial development was not designed to cope with such an extreme event. Compounding the issue, vital infrastructure such as levees, public transport systems and power stations were not adequately hardened.

The flooding resulted from heavy rain and a large coastal storm surge at a time of spring tides, all eventualities that could have been predicted.

Many scientists, and now the Climate Commission, have suggested that in a warmer world tropical storms will be more frequent or more dangerous than those previously experienced. This assertion is contentious, and evidence for it is lacking.

The Australian government appears to take advice on global warming and climate change from a wide and healthy range of sources.

These sources include the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), the CSIRO, the Department of Climate Change (DOCC, which incorporates the former federal Australian Greenhouse Office), the Climate Commission (CC) and the United Nations’ Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Advice is also fed into the national climate debate from a range of similar state-based bodies. For example, in Queensland alone there is a state Department of Climate Change, a Queensland Climate Change Centre of Excellence and the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility (NCCARF) at Griffith University.

Finally, climate policies are also urged on the government by spokespeople for many university climate-related research groups, business lobby groups and consultants, and by large environmental lobby organizations such as the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Climate Institute.

Given such a wide and diverse range of sources, one might conclude that the government must surely be getting sound advice, but in fact that would be a very wrong inference.

Citing leaked documents from the Heartland Institute, Steketee conveniently ignores that his evidence is a mixture of fabrications and stolen papers, a fact admitted by the perpetrator, Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute.

The substance of Steketee's charge is that Carter appears to be receiving pay for a fair day's work. Or is it the nature of the work that is so heinous: collecting and presenting evidence that refutes the alarmist claims? After all, Steketee has not similarly denounced the academic authors of the Climate Commission report from which he quotes favourably, a report prepared specifically to support prevailing government policy.

On November 10 last year, the government’s Multi-party Climate Change Committee (MCCC) received a summary of the state of global warming science from its sole scientist member, ANU’s Professor Will Steffen. (see Powerpoint presentation here…).

All policy discussion conducted within the committee since has been predicated upon the accuracy of Professor Steffen’s advice, which was that a high risk of human-related dangerous warming exists and that urgent steps need to be taken to curtail carbon dioxide emissions.

In a more recent speech last week, Climate Minister Combet indicated his continuing reliance upon the views of Professor Steffen, who had advised him that:

there is 100% certainty that the earth is warming, and that there is a very high level of certainty it will continue to warm unless efforts are made to reduce the levels of carbon pollution being sent into the atmosphere.

Although I am travelling in the US at the moment I have become aware of the controversy over your comments at an Adelaide school last week, including the public response by [a] scientist with an alarmist global warming bent.

You might be interested in the graph below. The data are temperatures reconstructed from Greenland ice cores and published in the peer reviewed literature. The data confirm pre-IPCC understanding of the climate history of the Earth: Earth warmed from the last glacial maximum about 15,000 years ago when great ice sheets covered North America and northern Europe and sea level about 130 m lower than today. By 9,000 years ago Earth had warmed to the Holocene maximum when temperatures were warmer than today; the Holocene maximum lasted until about 4,000 years ago and there has been irregular cooling since.

This report was sent to me by a colleague. It appears too good not to pass along. Bill Gray

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

The coming Senate vote on the badly misnamed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) is the culmination of intense propaganda spanning more than three decades. The Senate Bill aims at restricting emissions of carbon dioxide, a colourless, odourless gas essential to life, and has nought to do with smokestack carbon particles and other pollutants that have been regulated since the 1950s. The basis of the Bill is an unsustainable hypothesis that dangerous global warming will be an outcome of continued burning of fossil fuels and the rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

It is nearly 20 years since the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) in 1990 gave its first assessment of the likelihood and potential magnitude of human-caused global warming. In their first report in 1990 they confirmed that humans would have an impact on global temperatures as carbon dioxide levels increased. Importantly, the magnitudes of impacts were considered conjectural and subject to large uncertainty, because computer models of the time were rudimentary in their ability to represent the complex processes in the climate system.

The IPCC’s second report in 1995 was more confident, saying that the balance of evidence suggested a discernible human influence on global climate. By the time of the 2001 third report the IPCC was concluding that the ability of computer models to project future climate had increased and ‘the warming over the past 100 years is very unlikely to be due to internal variability alone, as estimated by current [computer] models’.

Emissions trading legislation, such as the “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme” (CPRS) bill that is currently before parliament, rests upon the assumption that human greenhouse emissions, especially carbon dioxide, (i) are pollutants, and (ii) are causing dangerous global warming. Neither of these assumptions is supported by empirical evidence, and both have been under scientific challenge for many years by a large body of qualified and independent scientists.

Cognisant of these facts, Senator Steve Fielding has posed three direct questions to the Minister for Climate Change, Senator Penny Wong, in order to clarify whether or not evidence exists that human carbon dioxide emissions are causing dangerous global warming, as alleged by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The Minister’s replies to the Fielding questions drew heavily on IPCC arguments and advice. Parliament, in preparing to implement policy based upon the advice of an international political agency, has not hitherto had available to it a due diligence scientific assessment of the adequacy of the IPCC recommendations (Professor Garnaut’s extensive report being an economic and not a scientific analysis). As independent scientists, and at the request of Senator Fielding, we provide preliminary scientific due diligence in this document.